The object—there really wasn’t any other word to describe it—was a floating sphere of light and darkness hovering about three feet off the deck in a corridor on the Heart of the Tempest. Just looking at a recording of it on the monitor’s small screen made his head hurt. Someone passed a length of pipe through it and back again on the recording. The pipe did not seem to interact with the object at all. And in fact Singh had the sense that he saw both the pipe and the object at the same time with equal clarity even when that should be impossible. It made his head hurt even worse.

